Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) (7 page)

Soon, those stronger ones who were not dead, who refused to lie down and die
, began to move in gangs out of the city centers. They imagined that someone was hoarding the food somewhere out there and it was only a matter of finding it. They were not far wrong. There was tons of grain rotting in silos all over the world with no trains or trucks to pick it up and take it to market or to the factories or bakeries. Whole herds of prime cattle had starved to death in the Mid-west USA when the feed trucks stopped arriving, though in places like Argentina where the cattle were range fed, those cattle could still eat grass and their owners slaughtered a few and distributed meat to their neighbors, since without refrigeration nothing would keep. A few people knew how to smoke or salt meat, as had been done for thousands of years before, mostly indigenous peoples who kept the knowledge and the meat to themselves.

So, from the inner cities and slums of New York and Philadelphia, London and Paris, Peking and Shanghai,
mobs of desperate, filthy starving people, mostly men, surged outward to the suburbs and beyond, looking for the land of milk and honey where all the food had gone. Sometimes they got lucky and found a stranded semitrailer full of crates of Cheerios or rotting bananas, and mostly they drank from streams and rivers. If there was no other food, when they caught a stranger, they cut some wood and had a barbecue.

At the time when the Amish barbecue was under away, a man was pedaling down the darkened road across the valley, lit only by the three-quarter moon. He had the lean wiry body of an experienced cyclist, but his expensive 10 speed bike was dirty and battered. He had lost his helmet and the cuff of his right pant leg was held by a strap which prevented it from tangling in the gears. He had a light pack on his back and looked as dirty and battered as his bike. His name was Phil Green, and he was nearing the end of his rope when he saw the light.

Afraid of what it might be, he approached cautiously, working his way across the fields, pushing the bike.

“--so if I understand right, we could stay as long as we helped with the defense of the whole Amish community and worked our farms instead of just easting the stock?” Tom was saying.

“Obviously, if you slaughter your animals for food every few days there will in a short time be nothing left. At that point I suppose you and your men could just move on, but I suggest that thinking about the longer term, if you actually work the farms, take care of the animals, eat the eggs instead of the chickens, plant and harvest, you can stay and perhaps survive what God has sent us.”

To his credit, Samuel said all of that without preaching or condescending.

“So we would be farmers?” Jack said with a tone of surprise, as though Samuel had said “astronauts” not farmers.

“Sure, why not?” Fred had interjected. My family arrived a few weeks ago, and these fine people showed us what to do and we have a small house south of here and some acres we work and it’s going along fine.”

“What did you do before?” Jack asked.

“I was a scientist. We were studying the Sun’s corona and we were probably among the first to see and analyze the data.”

“So you knew it was coming?” Will asked.

“A few days before, yes.
It took two days for the coronal ejection material to reach the Earth. We told the right people but no one imagined how bad it would actually be.”

“And now you’re a farmer,” Tom said.

“That’s right. I knew Samuel from before and figured that the Old Order Amish, who had always lived without electricity and modern technology, might have the best chance of survival.”

At this point Phil Green was seen at the edge of the firelight, standing quietly with his bicycle.

People drew back instinctively from fear. Several reached for their firearms.

“I saw the fire, “Phil said, tentatively. “
My name is Phil. I’m alone. I’ve been pedaling for over a week and I need to rest. I’m very hungry, too--”

The smell of the roasting meat was making his mouth water so much he could hardly speak.

“Where are you from, Phil?” asked Fred.

“
From Philadelphia. My wife Louise and I had a small apartment in a high rise building off the park. The apartment was useless after the first day and we moved to the Park with thousands of other people. There were huge barbecues as people emptied their dripping freezers and cooked the meat over anything that would serve to hold charcoal. When the charcoal was gone they used wood.

“
We ate and ate, filet mignon, lamb chops, chicken, duck, you name it. People brought it all out after a few days when their freezers became too warm. There was wine, whisky beer and good fellowship in a new adventure: how to live without the modern world we were born into. Weeks later, with the food and the fellowship long gone, the park emptied as people went to find another place. Some said there was food in the suburbs and that only we in the cities were hungry. Anything could be said and believed because all the sources of information were gone. There was no information but rumor and vile gossip.

“
A man in a cape went about recruiting volunteers to with him to Voorhees where he said the Jews had hidden all the food. Even some that thought the idea absurd went with him. After all, who knew anything anymore? Somebody might have food hidden in Voorhees. There were others who had messianic ideas and knelt praying and waiting for the Messiah to return. They prayed to the
aurora borealis
and some professed to see the Virgin Mary dancing in the moving colors and shapes.

“As people got hungrier fear and loathing grew. Past placing blame, having eaten all the cats and dogs, and whatever rats they could catch, they turned on each other—“

“Did you eat rats?” Jack asked.

“Sure. People call it “street rabbit.” Having never eaten a rabbit, I couldn’t
compare them. But rats taste like chicken—“

Everyone laughed.

“Well,” Samuel said. “You don’t have to eat rats tonight. Stay and share our feast. My son, William, returned after many years away and this is a feast in his honor.”

“You said you had a wife,” Fred said. “What happened to her?”

“Oh, they ate her. The rats were all gone—“

Phil had just barely escaped with his life, because he had been close to the bike and had out pedaled the mob. He had not stopped all day and night and had collapsed in a field and slept. He had washed his face and drunk from a stream, filled his water bottle and gotten back on the bike. He couldn’t really say how long he had been pedaling except he had started in Philadelphia and here he was in Lancaster County.

The few men Will and Mary had encountered at the house a few days before had been the vanguard, like the lone locust that previewed the onslaught of a plague of locusts. Because that what it was. A migration, plague, a great population movement from the cities outward, seeking food and life. It would be wrong to compare them to the “walking dead.” These people were the living dead, the almost dead, the moribund—but they moved grimly on, seeking something, anything they could eat, a horse, a dog, a cat, a person, it was all the same to them. And they were millions.

In
South America, from the
favelas
of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela they poured outward, also from the vast slums of Mexico City, Tokyo and Shanghai, Cape Town and Cairo. They poured into the Sahara and the Sinai Deserts where they perished in their thousands, but not before wreaking destruction and death to those who had so far survived the Event.

Countries
that had saved part of their power infrastructure that first day by shutting it down were in much better shape in the second month. Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, others in the area had limited electricity and some communications. This odd group, including the Palestinian Authority but not Hamas, struck a deal with Jerusalem for mutual defense and support. The Event had brought an uneasy peace to the Middle East. Food moved to market via horse, camel and donkey, but the Israelis had found a way to use a few antique cars, those that started with a hand crank. So the auto museums in the Middle East were emptied of their model T’s and there were some trucks and cars on the roads to deliver supplies.

Gradually other simpler vehicles from earlier times with 9 volt
electric systems and without computers were able to run. There was command and control, rations and water were distributed to everyone and civilization survived even thrived, in those areas in which it had begun thousands of years before. Places which had failed to do this sunk into chaos and barbarism.

The agreement with the Wild Men was much like the one with Fred and his family. They could live and work
the farms in the Amish Way, accept guidance in agricultural matters, respect the Amish Way of Life. But they did not have to attend church. It was a forced agreement, much as many the Vikings had made as they had taken over the North Saxon territories in the 9
th
and 10
th
centuries and merged with the indigenous peoples to help build a nation to be called “England.”

Fred made this histo
rical point until people were sick of hearing it. But it had its effect. What made this agreement yet more important was the unspoken threat of a barbarian horde that no one had yet really seen. Would they really get this far? Would they really strip the land clean like locusts? Would even the addition of the Wild Men be enough to secure the Amish land and their lives?

16.

The next time Solomon went to the Hospital
in Lancaster was with one of the Wild Men who had cut his foot badly with an axe. They wrapped up the limb and sat Bill, for that was his name, on the front seat of the buggy with his bloody foot propped up for the trip to town. What they found when they got there was a looted and gutted building, as were most of the others in the neighborhood. When their horse whinnied a head appeared in a basement window. It was Doctor Claire, looking frightened and very dirty.

“I hid in a closet when they came through,” she said when she came
out, still clutching her black doctor bag, the only thing she had managed to save. “They took all the others, even the patients. I could hear them screaming.”

“Come with us,” said Bishop Samuel. We need a doctor and of course we can’t leave you on your own here.”

“We have to hurry,” Claire whispered, looking around fearfully. They are still in the neighborhood even if the advance guard has moved on. I heard many, many—“  Her voice faded away. She was very much changed from the assertive, confident woman of only a few weeks before, Samuel thought as they took the road back to the farms. It was a puzzle now what he would do with her, a single woman. She certainly did not fit with the Wild Men on the three farms, nor with the core Old Order Amish community of which he was still the leader. Perhaps the Goodmans and their children, yes, yes, that might do—“

He was musing about that when Bill gave a warning shout.

“Look over there-- coming from those houses!”

A mob of people.
Samuel could think of no other word for such a large, disordered group. He was thinking in the German dialect that was the native tongue of all the Old Order Amish. They spoke English here as they spoke Spanish in their communities in Argentina, as a courtesy to their neighbors and so they could buy and sell what the Community needed.

“
Lieber Gott!
” he exclaimed now, flicking the reins to get his mare into a trot and then a canter pulling the heavy carriage. She could not gallop in the traces.

It was a very near thing. If
the horde had been able to move a little faster they would have cut them off. As it was, with his little, sturdy mare going as fast as she could, their pursuers clutched vainly at the passing carriage and were left in a swirl of dust. The people themselves seemed the color of dust and dirt, their grime-darkened faces twisted with hate and rage as they stumbled after them.

Not the walking dead—the limping dead, the
pathetic last-leggers—the dead who wouldn’t fall down—the ghosts of people who had been addicted to their digital toys as Dickens’ Londoners had been addicted to cheap gin.

It was one thing to hear about
the hordes of people surging out of the cities, it was quite another to actually see and smell them, thought Samuel.

They arrived back at the Church and the docter was given a room in the back to use as a temporary office where she could fix Bill’s cut foot and see other patients too, when needed.

Samuel called a meeting of the elders and invited Jack and Tom from Three Farms, as it was now beginning to be called.

He wasted no time getting to the point.

“I have seen
them and so has Dr. Claire, and she has told me things I am glad I did not see.”

He told them how the town of Lancaster
had been devastated and its people eaten by the Horde.

“They almost caught us on the way out. They are too sick and slow to move effectively and if you can get a start on them, you can get away.” he said. “Their strength is in their numbers. They are so, so many—“

“Do we have enough men and weapons to make a defense?” Fred asked.

Samuel thought for a moment as it was an important question and one that all the others had thought to ask.

“No.” he said softly. “I am no expert like Fred, but even if every bullet we fired at them were to strike home, we would not prevail. And they would not retreat from high losses because they don’t care. They literally have nothing to lose.”

“We have almost a hundred able-bodied men with my boys,” said Jack. “You don’t think we could—“

“We only have guns for eighty men. Look how long the perimeter would be—your three farms and then the rest of the Old Order farms. It’s literally miles long. If we set up a smaller perimeter here around this church and these houses we could defend it until we ran out of bullets or we were overwhelmed by their numbers. I’ve seen them too. We are far too few and poorly supplied. They may be here in a week or a month, whenever they run out of—“

He stopped, imagining the piles of corpses the Horde was feeding on.

“—food.”

“So, what do you suggest?” asked Samuel.

Fred thought, but it was Will who spoke first.

“Let me take a few days, it seems we have at least that, and go back to West Virginia
and see what I can find in the Blue Ridge. Actually there’s an old forestry camp up there that was abandoned a few years ago, near Green Ridge. It’s high and remote and only a few people know about it.”

“So you want to scout a place we could all move to?
Asked Tom incredulously.

“I don’t know if my people will want to give up their land after almost 300 years,” said Samuel.

The elders were looking very uncomfortable with the suggestion.

“I’m not sure we have much choice,” said Fred. “Let’s let Will go look and we can base our decision on what he finds.”

“Maybe we could make a stand right here,” Said Tom “I saw this movie once called
Zulu
, where—“

“
Ah, yes, the Defense of Rourke’s Drift. Great movie! Those men were trained British infantry led by experienced NCO’s and officers. They fought an army of Zulus who were brave, badly armed and far outnumbered them, but the Zulus called a halt when their casualties got too high. That won’t happen here, even if we were led by an army engineer, as the British were, and had plenty of ammunition, which we do not. And our enemy here will just keep coming until we are all dead. Forget the movies, Tom. Losing here means being invited to dinner—as the main course! You up for that?”

In the end Will took a few days’ supply of food and prepared for his journey. Mary had a pouty expression and Will knew she wanted to go with him.

“I would love your company, Mary, but it’ll be dangerous enough just for me, and then there’s the extra gas—“

“Are you saying I’m fat?”

“No, no! Of course not!” It’s just that I’m hoping to just make it there and back on one tank full. I can’t be sure I’ll get a chance to get more gas. I will use maybe 20% more fuel with you in back, light as you are.”

“Go, just go!” Mary said finally, annoyed that he was right and afraid she simply might never see him again and never even know what happened to him.